a cura di Anders Kreuger, Els Roelandt, Monika Szewczyk, KASK, Gent (Belgium) 2009 (pp. 350, s.i.p.)
The Belgian magazine A Prior (with Els Roelandt as its chief editor) publishes two monograph issues per year on artists' projects, a formula that makes the publication an interesting space for experimentation.
This issue focuses on a project by Nico Dockx, Rirkrit Tiravanija and Anton Vidokle, and reports discussions held in the new E-flux space in New York and the Beursschouwburg in Brussels.
For the occasion, the three artists have invited other artists and writers – Liam Gillick, Maria Lind, Sis Matthé, Miwon Kwon, Lawrence Weiner, Martha Rosler, Helena Sidiropoulos, Jan Verwoert, Louwrien Wijers, Dieter Roelstraete, Egon Hanfstingl and Steven Kaplan – to take part in the discussion along with a small audience.
The magazine content consists in a transcript of the conversations and a large number of illustrations that show how the basic vehicle of communication between the participants of these meetings was food, cooked by Tiravanija with the others' help.
This art project was, therefore, based on a mixture of words – the greatest means of intellectual communication – and food, as something that is common to everyone's experience and happens to be Tiravanija's favoured artistic medium. He uses food to create moments of social aggregation that break down the divisions caused by the excessive professionalisation of the art world.
As Tiravanija says: "The other tension was between writing and cooking (...) two kinds of working structure (...) it is supposed to be work that we are doing, but at the same time it also has to become textual." The project's meaning is summed up in his words. Food is the great vehicle of social relations and communication. It is far more complex than writing, which consists in abstract signs and leaves out the physical dimension of the body. It was actually by means of food that the artists were able to transform this into an art project.
The inspiration behind this project was "Food", a restaurant opened in SoHo by the artistarchitect Gordon Matta-Clark in the late 1970s. It was a difficult time for conceptual art, which had seen written text as one of the main expressive means for the new art. Tiravanija also came up with the project's key words: "Science is the past. Art is the present. Food is the future."
Nico Dockx, on the other hand, explains the method: "When we were thinking about how to produce this magazine (...) lots of things we said were about how to produce work in relation to the idea of non-production." And Vidokle's words provide confirmation: "What exactly facilitates a non-alienated experience? It's a very delicate thing and the ability to produce this (...) is very much at the centre of what all three of us do as artists."
Food was the framework chosen by the three artists as the "form" of the project produced jointly in New York and Brussels. By contrast, the open content of the discussions represents the many, and sometimes contradictory, issues that concern contemporary artists and art writers.
A "non-alienated experience" and a "non-production" approach are therefore crucial to artwork today. They must enable art to discover immediate ways to express itself and reach the contemporary world without passing via art schools, because they seem to want to produce the audience as well as the event.
Keeping the spaces open seems to be the basis of contemporary artwork and precisely what the three artists wanted to do with this project: conduct an experiment that could show contemporary art a way forward. Maurizio Bortolotti